The Politics Of Maginot Line Catholicism

A friend and reader of this blog sent me recently a copy of an essay in the current issue of the Fellowship Of Catholic Scholars Quarterly. The author is Susan Orr Traffas, a political science professor, and the title is “A Bad Catholic’s Guide to Good Politics: Looking at the Benedict Option through American Eyes.” I got around to reading it last night, and lo, once again we have a rejection of The Benedict Option by a smart person who shows no signs of actually having read the book.

You must think I’m making this up. In all nine pages of this review essay, there is not a single quote from my book. Not one. This, in a peer-reviewed academic journal.

Here is an early paragraph:

This call to “opt out” of political life is more popular now in light of recent erosions in American culture with respect to morality and marriage. Yet, to do so would be wrong in at least three ways. First, it goes against Christ’s call to go out into the world. We are not called to be as the Amish, withdrawn from the world. We are to be a proselytizing people. This is a function that we cannot perform if we are in a community only of those who already agree with us. Wouldn’t that at least be a failure of charity? …

And:

It also seems to me that the Benedict Option — or any form of massive retreat, however envisioned — fails on a theological level as well. … We need to take citizenship seriously again and at all levels. This means reintroducing ourselves to the task of doing more at the local level.

“Massive retreat”? I call for no such thing, as is obvious to anyone who troubled to read the book. Prescribing localism as a form of revived political engagement? I do that in the book! I believe that Prof. Traffas flat-out did not read The Benedict Option, or even just its chapter on politics. If she had, she would have seen, for example, this passage from the politics chapter, which holds out the example of a Czech Catholic anti-communist dissident as one for us to find ways to emulate in our own situation:

[Vaclav] Benda’s distinct contribution to the dissident movement was the idea of a “parallel polis”—a separate but porous society existing alongside the official Communist order. Says Flagg Taylor, an American political philosopher and expert on Czech dissident movements, “Benda’s point was that dissidents couldn’t simply protest the Communist government, but had to support positive engagement with the world.”

At serious risk to himself and his family (he and his wife had six children), Benda rejected ghettoization. He saw no possibility for collaboration with the Communists, but he also rejected quietism, considering it a failure to display proper Christian concern for justice, charity, and bearing evangelical witness to Christ in the public square. For Benda, Havel’s injunction to “live in truth” could only mean one thing: to live as a Christian in community.

Benda did not advocate retreat to a Christian ghetto. He insisted that the parallel polis must understand itself as fighting for “the preservation or the renewal of the national community in the widest sense of the word—along with the defense of all the values, institutions, and material conditions to which the existence of such a community is bound.

I personally think that a no less effective, exceptionally painful, and in the short term practically irreparable way of eliminating the human race or individual nations would be a decline into barbarism, the abandonment of reason and learning, the loss of traditions and memory. The ruling regime—partly intentionally, partly thanks to its essentially nihilistic nature—has done everything it can to achieve that goal. The aim of independent citizens’ movements that try to create a parallel polis must be precisely the opposite: we must not be discouraged by previous failures, and we must consider the area of schooling and education as one of our main priorities.

From this perspective, the parallel polis is not about building a gated community for Christians but rather about establishing (or reestablishing) common practices and common institutions that can reverse the isolation and fragmentation of contemporary society. (In this we hear Brother Ignatius of Norcia’s call to have “borders”— formal lines behind which we live to nurture our faith and culture—but to “push outwards, infinitely.”) Benda wrote that the parallel polis’s ultimate political goals are “to return to truth and justice, to a meaningful order of values, [and] to value once more the inalienability of human dignity and the necessity for a sense of human community in mutual love and responsibility.”

In other words, dissident Christians should see their Benedict Option projects as building a better future not only for themselves but for everyone around them. That’s a grand vision, but Benda knew that most people weren’t interested in standing up for abstract causes that appealed only to intellectuals. He advocated practical actions that ordinary Czechs could do in their daily lives.

And, as I say in the very first chapter, the strategic retreat the Ben Op calls for is for the sake of making Christians not only more resilient in the face of modern challenges, but also for the sake of more faithfully representing Christ to the world in which we live:

This is not just about our own survival. If we are going to be for the world as Christ meant for us to be, we are going to have to spend more time away from the world, in deep prayer and substantial spiritual training—just as Jesus retreated to the desert to pray before ministering to the people. We cannot give the world what we do not have. If Israel had been assimilated by the world of the ancient Near East, it would have ceased being a light to the world. So it is with the church.

I wonder why the academic peers who reviewed Prof. Traffas’s essay didn’t consider that her failure to quote my book a single time was a sign that she was writing in bad faith.

The Benedict Option is not primarily a political book, and it is certainly true that it does not offer a well-developed political program. One of the fundamental points of the book is that Christians, in general, have been so assimilated to the secular liberal order that we can no longer offer anything distinctly Christian to that order. Traffas’s point of view assumes that the Catholic Church (because she’s writing as a Catholic for Catholics) in this country is healthy, and has a lot to bring to the public square. As other chapters in my book point out, citing the research of Christian Smith and others, Christianity in the US is substantively weak. In fact, things are particularly bad for Catholics, who, both in terms of formal profession of faith, and especially in terms of belief in Catholic teaching, are in rapid collapse. (Don’t believe me? Start here.)

Aside from the dishonest way Traffas represents my book’s argument, she seems to believe in an America that no longer exists — or, to be precise, in an American Catholicism that no longer exists. Back in 2014, at the Dulles Symposium held at First Things magazine, I watched older Catholic scholars present comment in the same vein as Traffas. The younger ones, though, kept making the point that the Catholic undergraduates they teach today — often graduates of Catholic high schools — come to them as blank slates. They don’t know enough of the Catholic tradition even to begin to bring it to the public square. Prof. Traffas is writing about a world she wishes still existed, as opposed to the one that actually does. To maintain this point of view, you have to ignore a lot of evidence as assiduously as you ignore the argument of the book you purport to review.

For Christian conservatives and especially for Catholics, the later Bush years were a heady time. At least since the 1980s, Father Richard John Neuhaus and the rest of the First Things circle had been speaking of a “Catholic moment,” and in the late 1990s Crisis magazine began planning for it. Thanks not least to Karl Rove’s enterprising effort to capture the Catholic vote, such a moment seemed to be at hand. What the “Catholic moment” was supposed to mean, though, was a rather strange thing; and with a decade’s distance, it looks like little more than wishful thinking. But for young Catholics interested in politics, particularly those within the world of campus organizations or D.C. think tanks, the facts seemed auspicious.

Even though conservatives still complained about “judicial activism” and Roe v. Wade, for Bush-era Catholic intellectuals, the tide seemed to be turning. They were confident that “pelvic orthodoxy,” combined with market-oriented but “compassionate” economic policy, would secure a Republican future. A faith in the “ordinary” citizen prompted hope for referenda on gay marriage; opinion polls seemed to suggest a larger public rethinking of abortion; and the Bush-era “faith-based initiatives” promised a model in which church, state, and private enterprise might cooperate harmoniously for the good of all. With sectarian squabbles muted, Catholics and Evangelicals would have the ideas and the votes to effect lasting political change. Catholics told themselves, and believed, that they were no longer a reactionary rearguard, but were on the cusp of triumph. A Catholic-inspired conservative politics appeared to have momentum and, more than that, it deserved to have momentum. These trends were not just happy turns of fate; they were signs that the political philosophy cobbled together by Catholics and conservatives was correct and illuminating and destined to win. The leaders of this movement may not have been the “Theocons” of Linker’s title, but they fancied themselves essential contributors to the intellectual project of holding together the American regime in a way that might preserve Catholics and the Church from the threats of secular liberalism. And it was no downside that in the process they might come to hold crucial positions of state.

These “Theocons” were devoted conservative fusionists. Even before the “Catholic moment” arrived, fusionism had been the name given to the conservative political movement attempting to combine social conservatism and free-market capitalism (though the term was initially one of criticism). In the eyes of Catholic fusionists, their views were simply the correct application of Catholic principles to contemporary problems: the Church was to stand on the side of political and economic liberty against communism, and on the side of social and moral order against the sexual revolution. The Catholic fusionists drank so deeply of this system that eventually they forgot what the first fusionists knew well: that a traditional approach to social questions sits uneasily alongside a capitalism in which “all that is solid melts into air.” But fusionism is a fitting name since the fundamental premise of the Catholic fusionist approach—rarely articulated, but always present—was that the principles of American conservatism and those of Catholic social teaching might be seamlessly and unproblematically combined.

The Catholic fusionists in fact took this position one step further. Not merely did they assert a possible symbiosis between the traditions of American liberty and the traditions of the Church, but they came to see the midcentury American political settlement as the very embodiment of Catholic social teaching. There was only one thing lacking, they thought, in the American social and political order—modern Americans had lost the Founders’ sense of the natural law principles that could hold the Republic together, principles that the Catholic tradition was ready to supply. Implausible and unnecessary as this might seem to those looking on at Catholic intellectual developments from the outside, it is hard to overstate the power that this image exerted on the “American Church” from the nineteenth century onward. Public doubt over whether Catholics could be good American citizens somehow combined, alongside the spectacular growth of the Catholic Church in this country, to produce an intense Catholic patriotism which equated chipper American liberalism with Catholic teaching itself.

You had to squint a lot to see orthodox Catholicism as the Bush-era GOP at prayer. More Gallagher:

But there were elements of that political tradition that this vision had to exclude. One could hardly grasp the American Church’s long-standing skepticism of free-market economics by reading the texts of Catholic fusionists. A vast number of books, homilies, and publications of bishops and popes demonstrates the Church’s deep interest in the “social question,” strong support for labor unions, and doubts (however awkwardly or ambiguously expressed) about the capitalist system. But when the fusionists did not simply ignore these, they tended to dismiss them as magisterial obiter dicta, quite without authority for the Catholic faithful. It is, of course, no surprise that the Catholic fusionists were eager to represent their views as rooted in perennial Catholic teachings. No Catholic likes imagining that he’s adulterating the faith with an alien or opposed school of thought. But this effort required more than a little finessing. For the most part, and despite the academic credentials that they often bore and bruited about, the proponents of this fusionism frequently betrayed rather shallow roots in the tradition they claimed to represent. In many cases, the role played by the Catholic side of the “marriage of convenience” was little more than a veneer: the Acton Institute might put a Christian gloss on Hayek, and First Things might cover typical neoconservatism with a sort of evangelical fig leaf, but the core ideas and proposals were self-subsistent, external to, and usually hostile to Catholicism itself. It was a tale of unrequited love: Catholic intellectuals eagerly offered their support to the traditions of American liberalism, but for the most part they were only preaching to their own choir, and one that was far from typical even within the Church itself.

By 2012, it was clear that this project had failed utterly. Gallagher says 2015’s Obergefell decision was the icing on the cake. In fact, recognition of the failure of the movement was the cause of the 2014 Dulles Symposium, and its attempt to lay the groundwork for charting a new course. The centerpiece of that event was Prof. Michael Hanby’s powerful essay, concerning the end of “The Civic Project Of American Christianity.”

Hanby’s contention is that contrary to the views of Catholic neoconservatives (Neuhaus, Weigel, Novak, and others), the metaphysical claims of traditional Christianity can no longer be reconciled with the liberal order undergirding American politics. Given the developments of late liberalism, the contradictions have become unsustainable. He writes:

The civic project has taken as gospel ­[Jesuit Father John Courtney] Murray’s conviction that the founders “built better than they knew.” But this presupposes the very thing in question: that the state and its institutions are merely juridical and that they neither enforce nor are informed by the ontological and anthropological judgments inherent in their creation. That exactly the opposite has more or less come to pass suggests rather that the founders built worse than they intended, that the founding was in some sense ill-fated. This does not make liberty any less of an ideal or its obvious blessings any less real. It simply suggests a tragic flaw in the American understanding and articulation of it. Nor need this diminish our affection for our country, though it is an endlessly fascinating question, what American patriotism really means today. One can love his country despite its philosophy, provided there is more to the country than its philosophy. Yet it is surely a sign of the impoverishment of common culture and the common good—and an index of the degree to which liberal order has succeeded in establishing itself as both—that we are virtually required to equate love of country with devotion to the animating philosophy of the regime rather than to, say, the tales of our youth, the lay of the land and the bend in the road, and “peace and quiet and good tilled earth.”

This creates a great temptation for protagonists on all sides of the civic project—right, left, and in between—to conflate their Christian obligation to pursue the common good with the task of upholding liberal order, effectively eliminating any daylight between the civic and Christian projects. For example, virtually absent from our lament over the threats to religious freedom in the juridical sense is any mention of that deeper freedom opened up by the transcendent horizon of Christ’s resurrection, though this was a frequent theme of Pope Benedict’s papacy. If we cannot see beyond the juridical meaning of religious freedom to the freedom that the truth itself gives, how then can we expect to exercise this more fundamental freedom when our juridical freedom is denied? Too often we are content to accept the absolutism of liberal order, which consists in its capacity to establish itself as the ultimate horizon, to remake everything within that horizon in its own image, and to establish itself as the highest good and the condition of possibility for the pursuit of all other goods—including religious freedom.

I really hope you will read all of Hanby’s essay. It’s remarkable, and quite challenging. He makes it crystal clear that Catholic neoconservatism no longer works because American culture rejects Catholic (and traditionally Christian) anthropology. Metaphysics is inevitably a guide to politics, and in our case, what the masses believe a human being to be is not what the Christian tradition teaches. In his own piece, Gallagher notes that Ryan T. Anderson’s, Sherif Girgis’s, and Robert George’s thin, tightly argued natural law defense of marriage had no effect on the debate when it appeared in 2012. I read the book at the time, and thought it truly excellent. But I also knew it would be ignored, because being a post-Christian nation means that we reject the metaphysical claims of Christianity.

Back to Gallagher’s essay. He points out that despite the failures of conservative Catholics to advance in the public square, or even to defend successfully the shrinking space given to orthodox Christians in it, the intellectual-industrial complex continues to manufacture arguments:

Unfortunately, the complete reversal from their influential position during the late Bush years does not appear to have dealt much of a blow to the network of broadly “conservative” Catholic think tanks, conferences, and periodicals. Nor does it seem to have done much to dry up the donor monies that keep this network on life support. But in the alliance of conservatives and Catholics, the Catholics no longer hold the reins. The thought leaders have apparently still been thinking, and are certainly still writing, but as the conservative political world came under the influence of the Tea Party, and eventually of the Trump movement, these Catholic energies and activities became ever more extraneous to it. Apart from occasional, marginal, and largely unserious spectacles like Paul Ryan’s invocation of Thomas Aquinas in defense of his fiscal proposals, the dream of a “Catholic moment,” in which the faith might be a major political influence, has quite evaporated. And yet all through Obama’s presidency, these wheels continued to turn—the Catholic network of donors, pundits, and minor political philosophers had become almost self-sustaining, and carried on.

Gallagher says younger Catholics who hold to theological orthodoxy are now looking to pre-modern, anti-liberal sources of political thought within the Catholic tradition, e.g., integralism. And why not?:

On its own terms, a Catholicism more critical of the mainstream of American thought would have little to recommend it to outsiders. Neither Republicans nor Democrats nor libertarians have any real appetite for neoscholastic treatises on political order; there is no base of donors or network of think tanks eager to promote the careers of young “integralist” scholars or assure them of an audience for their writings. But in the wake of the practical failure of the Catholic fusionists, of the closure of the “Catholic moment,” of the arrival in many places of a secular right-wing politics not beholden to Christian sources, now is the time for Catholics to avail themselves of all the sources needed to understand the current crisis—and even, if the possibility emerges, to make a positive contribution to rebuilding from political liberalism’s steady decline.

Read the whole thing. It’s quite good, and it’s quite important. As much as I disagree with the integralists, they have the virtue of at least understanding that Catholic fusionism is done for. Don’t get me wrong: the late Richard John Neuhaus was, in my estimation, a good man, and an important man. He and the school of thought he led did their very best to square a circle. But we now know that it couldn’t have been done, at least not under the conditions in which they made the attempt.

I don’t believe in integralism, and not only because I’m not a Catholic. While it is true that as an Orthodox Christian, I would find a polity governed by the moral principles of the Roman Catholic Church to be more in keeping with the common good than what we have now, I see no way to accomplish that in the real world without handing over to men like Theodore McCarrick and Donald Wuerl the power of the state. If you really do believe that the world was better off with the State deferential to the will of Catholic bishops, ask yourself how well that worked out for sex abuse victims in pre-2002 Boston.

I would gently suggest that the integralist critics of liberalism may be focusing too much on the theory of liberalism and not enough on the condition of their Church.

We can look at liberalism not just as an ideology of individual rights superintended over by a powerful central authority. It is also as a practical negotiation made among “those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community” within what used to be called Christendom. The Catholic Church in America may have lost the vigor and “fecundity” that Leo XIII observed in it over a century ago. And insofar as it has, it has lost some of its practical bargaining power.

See how the Reverend John I. Jenkins, the president of Notre Dame University, took several contradictory positions on the contraception mandate. His school became a plaintiff, arguing against it, as an infringement of religious liberty, in the highest courts in America. But, faced with dissension among professors, he reversed himself.

This level of dissension on matters of moral doctrine is everywhere in Catholic institutions, not just in universities but on the boards of Catholic health-care and charitable organizations and in diocesan secondary and primary schools. Such dissension characterizes the whole Church in America, a country where the second-largest reported religious affiliation is “ex-Catholic.”

More:

And here then is another modest suggestion. The more urgent need for the Church’s liberty in the United States may not demand an attempt to transcend 500 years of a mistaken political philosophy. Instead it may be a matter of looking at a decades-long problem of disaffection and apostasy. The Church also suffers from a massive scandal of immorality and criminality among its prelates. These crimes, so long unaddressed by higher authorities in the Church, manifestly call into question not just the Church’s commitment to its doctrines but its fitness to lead so many civic institutions and to control so many resources. Are America’s Catholic bishops conducting themselves “as worthy members of the community?” And if not, can we expect their religious liberty to remain sacrosanct?

If the Church recovered its vigor and its authority internally, then the neighbors with whom it lives peaceably, and among whom we do so many good works, would be less inclined to test our commitments, or our patience. The social Kingship of Christ may proceed to impose duties upon all nations, but it begins with the words: Physician, heal thyself.

To put a finer point on it: nobody wants to listen to advice of the Catholic Church on how to govern a civil polity when it cannot even govern itself.

Integralism is a dead end, theoretically and practically, but then again, so is Catholic fusionism. To bring this full circle, Dougherty’s piece also serves as a response to Prof. Traffas’s High Weigelism. The American churches — Catholic and otherwise — have demonstrably become far more accommodated to the world of liberal modernity than its people want to believe. If we are going to have anything distinctly Christian to offer to the post-Christian world, it will only come after we have recovered our faith and traditions. It’s not only the Catholic Church in America that needs to heal itself before trying to bring the life-saving prescriptions of the Great Physician to a hurting world.

This is the main point of The Benedict Option. We Christians are not simply to run away from a world gone bad, but run towards something very good: a more profound engagement with Scripture, Tradition, and Christian community. Because lay people are not called to the monastic state, we naturally live in the world. If we are going to be salt and light for that world, as we are called to be, then we have to devote ourselves to defending what is distinctly Christian within our own communities, and cultivating authentically Christian lives. Most of us Christians are failing to do that, which is why we are losing our own children to the faith in such large numbers.

Aside from voting defensively in state and national elections, the only serious Christian politics that make sense to me under these conditions are the localist politics of a Vaclav Benda or a Patrick Deneen. As Deneen says in his great book Why Liberalism Failed, we are entering a time of localist political experimentation, in which the faithful have to rediscover and rebuild political community at the local level. And here’s another quote from The Benedict Option:

Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs magazine and a fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, contends that religious conservatives would be better off “building thriving subcultures” than seeking positions of power. Why? Because in an age of increasing and unstoppable fragmentation, the common culture doesn’t matter as much as it used to. Writes Levin:

The center has not held in American life, so we must instead find our centers for ourselves as communities of like-minded citizens, and then build out the American ethic from there. . . . Those seeking to reach Americans with an unfamiliar moral message must find them where they are, and increasingly, that means traditionalists must make their case not by planting themselves at the center of society, as large institutions, but by dispersing themselves to the peripheries as small outposts. In this sense, focusing on your own near-at-hand community does not involve a withdrawal from contemporary America, but an increased attentiveness to it.

I might be wrong about that, but I see the Benedict Option, and the experiments it will engender, as a more realistic and hopeful political strategy than doubling down on Catholic/Christian fusionism, or attempting to resurrect antiliberal Catholicism in a culture that is not only fundamentally Protestant, but also post-Christian. If you want to have a more vigorously Christian polity (and I do), then you have to first have a more vigorously Christian church. This project of rebuilding is going to take a long, long time.

What I continue to marvel over is why intelligent Christians like Prof. Traffas and the academic peers that reviewed her article before publication are so eager to dismiss the Benedict Option that they publish an entire journal article denouncing a straw man. There is not a single line from my book quoted in that nine-page review dismissing it, and no evidence that the author even read the book. Are the Catholic neoconservatives really so desperate to defend their defunct project that they cast their scruples aside, and make things up about books they perceive as threats? What are they so afraid of?

Woe betide the young Christians who place their faith in this Maginot Line Catholicism.

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86 Responses to The Politics Of Maginot Line Catholicism

You’re getting Jordan Petersoned….or he’s just getting the treatment you’ve been receiving the past year or more.

It sure seems that what matters nowadays is having a strong opinion damnit, and even better if it echoes the current groupspeak, and you’re able to demonstrate how clever you are when giving it. Actually know something that your opining about? Or read the book your critiquing? Gosh, why, those are just incidental details and not worth of discussion.

[Please understand that my ire in this particular case is that a professor wrote an essay on the book, and the essay appeared a year after its publication, but she gives no indication of having read the thing. If I had called the book “Buddenbrooks,” it wouldn’t have made a difference. — RD]

You don’t think that when people unfamiliar with your work see “The Benedict Option”, they think they understand it immediately to mean a “full retreat”? It certainly seems to me in the multiple cases we have seen so far where reviewers have shown ignorance of the content that they have all had the same misconceptions and that they come from the title. Benedict = monastery = retreat. Stupid but then people are…

[NFR: If you’re writing a review essay, basic ethics require you to have read the book. — RD]

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes, a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

Referencing the above comment of M_Young (“Just an FYI — reviews aren’t peer reviewed”) and perhaps others, and as a member of the society that publishes the FCSQ, I would like to point out that the piece by Susan Orr Traffas is not a simple book review, but a book review essay, and that it has several footnotes (or endnotes), and that as such the lack of any footnoted citations of or references to the subject of the review is thus unprofessional and objectionable.

I’m not surprised that got under your skin. The fact that you bristle at that characterization demonstrates that you are in fact a liberal, notwithstanding your attraction to the arguments of Deneen & co., as is further evidenced by your reaction to impingements on religious liberty and your obvious revulsion at the idea of imposing your own religious views on others.

If one rejects the defining syllogism of liberalism (i.e., that the individual is the sole locus of rights, interests, and obligations; that individuals are moral equals; and that therefore freedom of conscience is morally necessary), as you, Rod, don’t really but some of these integralists do, then I think “freedom is bad” is a fair, if simplistic, characterization.

And please don’t get me started on “freedom really means freedom to do what you ought to do, as defined by me”.

[NFR: It got under my skin because it’s a stupid characterization, along the lines of, “So why do you hate America?” — RD]

An excellent, excellent piece. I want to quibble with one thing, though: “…we have to devote ourselves to defending what is distinctly Christian within our own communities, and cultivating authentically Christian lives. Most of us Christians are failing to do that, which is why we are losing our own children to the faith in such large numbers.”

I don’t think the failure of Christian parents to make that effort is the main problem there. An awful lot of people were doing Benedict Option sorts of things all through the ’80s and ’90s. Whatever they–okay, we–may have done wrong, we were certainly *trying* to the best of our ability. And let me tell you the attrition rate in the next generation is nevertheless very high. Some leave in bitterness, some just drift away. The last thing they want, as far as I can tell, is to be associated with anything “distinctively Christian.” My gloomy news is that many, many children of Christian families are going to leave the faith no matter what the parents do. The allure of the non-Christian world is *extremely* powerful.

“To put a finer point on it: nobody wants to listen to advice of the Catholic Church on how to govern a civil polity when it cannot even govern itself.”
Well, you don’t need to look at Boston to see that. Ireland was more Catholic than Italy, and voters have recently done away with both gay marriage and abortion prohibitions. Because they discovered that a Church-run society was a cure worse than the disease. If it is true that a moral order has to exist outside the government, but the moral order being invoked is corrupt, much of the argument for conservatism evaporates.

For those advocating integralism, I ask you to read this 8/23/18 post by a faithful Roman Catholic Irishman. He has watched his nation destroyed and is living in the midst of an angry backlash against the past integralism. Integralism is like socialism. People think the gross failures of the past are flukes. They think their predecessors just didn’t do it right. Learn from history. Its not just dangerous, it’s permeated with evil waiting to be unleashed again.

“The abuse of political and social power by the Catholic church in Ireland rivalled the mullahs in Iran. But it was the appalling sex abuse scandals and abuse in Irish institutional homes which ultimately destroyed the Catholic church in Ireland and reduced it to shell of itself. The widespread abuse of children sexually and physically by brothers, nuns, and priests has little parallel across the world. The apostasy of these clergy (a minority but a large one) created the apostasy in the Irish people today.”

“[NFR: It got under my skin because it’s a stupid characterization, along the lines of, ‘So why do you hate America?’ — RD]”

And the only reason freedom is in the category of America, Mom, and apple pie is because America was founded on liberal principles, and we Americans have all been formed by liberal assumptions.

“Freedom is bad” would be a pretty unexceptional utterance at a Chinese Communist Party meeting, just as “Why do you hate America?” would be a perfectly natural question in, say, Iran, and “When (or why) did you stop beating your wife?” would be a perfectly neutral question in Saudi Arabia.

That ‘Catholic Moment’ you mention coincided closely with my kids’ first communions, CCD classes, and confirmations. It’s no wonder the moment passed, because, from my humble vantage point, Catholic religious ed. lacked any real substance. Somehow one of the wealthiest institutions in the world, represented to us by the well-heeled diocese of Orange County, CA. (it dropped over $50 million dollars on the questionable purchase of a glitzy mega-church prototype, the ‘Crystal Cathedral’), had very little information to convey about Christ. My kids passed through the process and were confirmed. But by the time they reached that end-point they knew less about what Christianity is really all about than I did after 1 year of Bible class in a parochial protestant (DCR) jr. high in the early ’70s, a class in which we studied the Gospels closely. The time and hope my family wasted helped convince me that my own religious movement, which (as the husband of a woman born into a large, devout Catholic family) had been toward Catholicism for most of my adult life, had to stop. There was no there there. I still try to keep JC in my heart and mind, but now I know he doesn’t linger in the same places I thought I saw him in before.

“Freedom is bad” would be a pretty unexceptional utterance at a Chinese Communist Party meeting

Not hardly. Whatever you think of the way they live up to their rhetoric, or don’t, “freedom” is a word prominently used in communist propaganda. Its what they’re fighting for (under the direction of an all-powerful central committee imposing iron discipline).

Freedom is probably a more communist term than it is a liberal one. Liberals conducted drum head court martials and shot people without trial in Paris, 1871, summarily hanged Luddites in Britain, invented the cold war and the red scare, justified slavery on the grounds that it freed gentlemen to enjoy the benefits of the Enlightenment…

and no Muslim nation is remotely capable of conquering the US (or any part thereof) militarily.

A more plausible long-term scenario is that if China ever conquers the USA, it might clear out a large area to deport its Muslim Uighur minority to, and then Muslims from other areas might flock to the new caliphate.

Not every thing farted out my the Catholic magisterium is the unquestionable word of God. That goes for the philosophical, theological, and economically illiterate criticisms of the free market and promotion of the “God + Socialism” model of mainstream Catholic social doctrine, the one that tells us Communist China is a model of Catholic social teaching and that was invoked by Mussolini’s fascists in support of their policies.

No, thanks. There is, in fact, a very robust proto-libertarian thread in actual *traditional* Catholic social doctrine, even if all the popes since Leo XIII have been ignorant of it. Pope Francis is not the first pope in history to say stupid things about these subjects.

And besides, Neuhaus, Novak, Weigel, and co. are not even proponents of laissez faire. They and their ilk were and are conservative social democrats, perfectly content with modest economic regulations and a modest welfare state, not to mention an interventionist American foreign policy in the name of “solidarity” and “the common good.” So give me a break about these folks being worshipers of the market.

A more plausible long-term scenario is that if China ever conquers the USA, it might clear out a large area to deport its Muslim Uighur minority to, and then Muslims from other areas might flock to the new caliphate.

I doubt any such conquest of that sort will occur, any time soon. “Never get into a land war in Asia” has long been good advice, and although it has never been tested, “never get into a land war in North America” is probably good advice for the same reason: an incredibly large landmass loaded with natural resources that it is virtually impossible for an invading army to pacify, or starve into submission. And one with plenty of hostile terrain, and in the northern climes, hostile winters.

Now we might get nuked to smithereens in the future, and if that happens then an invading caliphate would be the least of our worries.

OTOH, if China were capable (both morally and militarily) of conquering the US of A–surely they could deal with an unruly Muslim minority by less expensive means than moving a couple million people across the ocean.

I don’t know what you mean by integralism, but I do agree with this, as far as it goes: “The apostasy of these clergy (a minority but a large one) created the apostasy in the Irish people today.”

The majority, on the other hand, went along, cheerfully or reluctantly, with the total destruction of the Roman liturgy and the abandonment of the authoritative preaching of the faith, weakening everything supernatural, with inevitable results. Look around.

It seems that we have to learn the hard way, again, that there is no peace, or justice, without Christ, just as the pagan world learned prior to the Incarnation.

More liberalism won’t do anything to cure the flood of evils flowing from liberalism. We need Christ, He Who spoke as one having authority. Does anybody read Holy Writ any more?

Liberalism, of course, is the doctrine of exaggerated individualism, which makes liberty (a means, not an end) into the highest value. A more pernicious doctrine hardly seems to have been invented by man…

E. J. Worthing said “Anderson, Girgis, and George’s argument concerning marriage was not “tightly argued.” It was a howler.”

[NFR: You read the book, did you? — RD]

The book was tightly argued, Rod is right. But, like most efforts of its type, it’s effectiveness depends on the reader’s willingness to buy into its metaphysical and epistemological premises. If one sees the world the way they do, it is a powerful, even elegant, work of moral philosophy. But the premises are far from self evident and easy for even a Christian reader to simply dismiss. In that case, as E.J. Worthing notes, it becomes an amusing but very unpersuasive intellectual exercise.

“I haven’t read the book, but Jason Lee Steorts in National Review takes the thesis down nicely.”

Steorts’ “review” is exactly what one would expect from NR — breathless right-liberal boilerplate. He seemingly has little grasp of the philosophical issues at hand. (Interestingly enough, both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche – neither of them Catholic!) did in their own way grasp them, and that was 150 years ago. Steorts has no excuse.) His review is simply a right-liberal polemic intended to convince the NR readers that critiques of the modern idea of freedom are “anti-American.”

Note: you can add D.B. Hart to the enemies list as well. And he isn’t Catholic either.

@savvy – “Integralism is not Catholic. Catholic neocons always struck me as very Protestant, in their rabid individualism, and defense of Calvinist capitalism.”

I’m in agreement with RD that integralism is very Catholic. There are numerous deleterious examples of that in their history. I would ask that you become better acquainted with the differences within Protestantism and church history. There are great differences between the Reformers and the Radical Reformers. There are some great differences between the Reformers: Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, and the churches that followed their lead. There is no way to explain these things in a combox, but I would say that to caricature the problems as rabid individualism and Calvinist capitalism shows an unsound understanding of Protestantism and church history. There is legitimate criticism of Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. None of our traditions are free of faults, errors, and sin. And all our our histories are messy. Its easy to take cheap shots at any of us.

I think the Church has a lot to say to the political moment on immigration, refugees, climate change, income distribution and reducing abortion (if some of its proponents can get over decriminalization as the means). Saying it persuasively before dealing with abusive priests and bishops who covered up for them.

Rod Dreher and others who think the Robert George “What Is Marriage?” argument a strong one have not considered how inapt “acts of a generative kind” is to the marriage debate as opposed to the contraception debate, where it was ably deployed by G. E. M. Anscombe. Think about why not. (Hint: the contraception debate necessarily *assumes* the actual capacity to procreate.)

One person who admired and relied on the George argument was Charles J. Cooper, who was embarrassed when Justice Kagan asked him at oral argument why aged couples are allowed to marry and same-sex couples are not. If Cooper had answered that the difference is that octogenarian opposite-sex couples can engage in acts of a generative kind, he would have been in real trouble in trying to explain why he believed physiology was more fundamental to biology than genetics. As it was, Cooper offered no answer.

And so, as Rod would say, here we are. By the time Obergefell was argued, Cooper’s mistake in thinking the “What Is Marriage” argument a strong one was not repeated at oral argument or in the dissenting opinions.

OTOH, if China were capable (both morally and militarily) of conquering the US of A–surely they could deal with an unruly Muslim minority by less expensive means than moving a couple million people across the ocean.

Scotty, I didn’t say it was likely, just MORE plausible than the previous scenario. But when have powerful cliques bent on world conquest and national triumphalism ever been graced with an abundance of reason?

@Savvy, I encountered the Monastic Communities of Jerusalem at Vézelay, back in the 1990s, and I think they are terrific. They had been installed at Vézelay to “re-Catholisize” the basilica there, after the town had been overrun with New Agers. They are now in charge of Mont St. Michel (http://jerusalem.cef.fr/jerusalem/en/en_22msm.html) of “The Benedict Option” book jacket fame. Thus I have mentioned them several times in comments on this blog. They are a newish order (founded in the 1970s, I believe), and are living proof that there is such a thing as reverent and beautiful post-VII liturgies. Here is video on which one can hear their glorious singing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X5SeObe_k8.

With the overall thrust, as long as (it’s just me) slaying the wounded prey of Catholic Fusionism does (as an initionary act) commit one to the totalitarian temptation of the Confessional State. The notion of civic order and peace – in the West – got off on the wrong foot when Charlemagne was crowned by the Bishop of Rome.

The Confessional State was born from an urgency – and the too common need to ground present power. That urgency may be understandable but uninformed by that which was handed off and on by the Old or New Israel.

OK,OK, the roaring lion of Intrgalism may lick the pus from many a liberal infected sore, yet it, too, seeks (like a roaring, devouring beast) political and civic absolutism as any of history’s unfettered *movements* set loose to roar about.

The Intregalist’s Confessional State may be the larger (final/eschatological) goal, but to get there requires the subjection (and subversion) of way too much – including Benedict Options.

Rod, your exasperation at certain reviewers inability to understand and unwillingness to cite your book mirrors my own exasperation at your boneheaded treatment of what you call “Catholic integralism”.

The new post-liberal thrust in Catholic political thought has nothing to do with “handing over to men like Theodore McCarrick and Donald Wuerl the power of the state”. The integralism with which I identify (informed mostly by reading Milbank, Hauerwas and Cavanaugh) has nothing to do with granting political authority to the Catholic hierarchy. If anything, it has to do with granting religious authority to a secular hierarchy. In his book, “Before Church and State” Andrew Willard Jones shows how in the integral, sacramental society of the high Middle Ages, the king is best understood as a sort of secular pope. The legitimacy of his rule was drawn directly from scripture and his authority was thought to be explicitly ordained by God. Within an integral society, the difference between king and pope was not divided according to our modern divisions of secular and sacred but according to the different powers with which their office had been invested by God. This is seen in the medieval concept of the two swords. The king was given the secular sword and the power to sanction military violence. The pope was given the spiritual sword and the ability to sanction spiritual violence, so to speak, via his most powerful weapon of excommunication which could cut off a soul from her means to salvation, the sacraments.

While in this scheme the pope did have more power than the king, the soul being more important than the body, in an integral society king and pope constantly checked one another’s power. It is not until the Church begins to grant, in modernity, the existence of an autonomous, secular realm independent of the claims of theology that we start to see strongly theocratic and authoritarian construals of the Church hierarchy. Unlike in an integral society where it was thought to be perfectly legitimate for the king (the secular pope, if you will) to check the pope, now that there is thought to exist an autonomous, secular sphere that exists without theological sanction, the secular ruler’s relationship to Church authority is increasingly an all-or-nothing option between either bitter antagonism or sycophantic submission.

While I was raised Roman Catholic, I left the church years ago. I attended Catholic schools thru college with some success. Now the church in America reminds me of a drowning man. People on the shore are trying to decide what to do but the man is going down for the third time. The Roman Catholic church in Europe is dead, and in the USA not far from dead. As an observer of the situation, it is too late to teach the man how to swim. The Catholic church is evil! It deserves to die. Sell the churches property and give the proceeds to the victims of their abuse!

Re: doubt any such conquest of that sort will occur, any time soon. “Never get into a land war in Asia” has long been good advice, and although it has never been tested, “never get into a land war in North America” is probably good advice for the same reason.

Count me highly skeptical too. The Pacific is a wide ocean and projecting power from Asia to North America would be a logistical nightmare. In WWII the US had two advantages in doing the reverse: we already Hawaii to start from and the main island groups lie closer to Asia than North America allowing us to use them as stepping stones to Japan.
And a thermonuclear arsenal remains a tripwire that concentrates the mind wonderfully.

I sent this as an email attachment Monday. As I see no acknowledgment of it on your site, I’m copying and pasting. JT

On Friday you wrote how insulted you are at the fact that my wife, Susan Orr Traffas, wrote an article about the Benedict Option and said hardly a word about your book. Indeed, you three times complain about Susan’s giving no evidence of having read your book and about “the dishonest way Traffas represents my book’s argument.” Your tone was such that, if I were a true gentleman and not a last gentleman, I’d challenge you to a duel. But I am, after all, something like Will Barrett in Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman, whose family “had turned ironical and lost its gift for action.” Indeed, as a frequent visitor to the Walker Percy Weekend in St. Francisville, you might at least have informed your readers that Susan gives far more attention to Percy than to you and Alasdair MacIntyre.

In any event, I mainly want to dispel a couple of notions you have about Susan and the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, in whose Quarterly her speech appeared. (I realize you couldn’t see the whole issue, which is not online yet.) I must clarify that I am a friend but not an employee of Benedictine College where Susan teaches (and where you spoke last year—and posted about an earlier version of Susan’s talk: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-benedict-option-evangelism ), and I am a friend but not a member of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars. I have time on my hands to look at the internet. Susan teaches full-time and administers programs; she hasn’t read your recent post.

The first thing to be noted is that Susan gave a speech, at the FCS convention in 2017. Her casual tone was partly covered over by the time of publication, but is visible at points, as when she talks about the Qualitative-Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer invented by Dr. Tom More, the protagonist of Walker Percy’s serious-playful novel Love in the Ruins. At times Susan’s tone is also hortatory: “We need to toughen up a bit, not retreat.” Such language isn’t often found in peer-reviewed articles.

And on that matter, you make much of the FCSQ being a “peer-reviewed journal,” and indeed the back page of the Quarterly instructs, “All submissions should be prepared for blind-review.” But you seem not to appreciate the very first sentence of the FCS, Statement of Purpose on the back cover of the Quarterly: “We Catholic scholars in various disciplines join in fellowship in order to serve Jesus Christ better by helping one another in our work and by putting our abilities more fully at the service of the Catholic faith.” The FCS is—a fellowship. It isn’t the Catholic Theological Society of American or American Catholic Philosophical Association—organizations devoted first to scholarship in the respective fields. Contrast the beginning of the FCS statement of purpose with that of opening sentence of the CTSA: “Our purpose, within the context of the Roman Catholic tradition, is to promote studies and research in theology, to relate theological science to current problems, and to foster a more effective theological education, by providing a forum for an exchange of views among theologians and with scholars in other disciplines.” (No Jesus Christ there!) As I understand the FCS, the Fellowship was formed 40 years ago to provide orthodox Catholics scholars in various fields a forum for supporting each other and the Church in a climate of wide-spread dissent from Church teaching.

So, I think you misread both the purpose of Susan’s talk and of the organization/journal in which it appeared. But more than this, you seem to claim a proprietary interest in “the Benedict Option™” such that anyone who so much as uses the term must, first of all, address your book. To your credit you have popularized a convenient image expressing a general manner in which a Christian might engage the times in which he lives. In your 1 April 2017 post on the symposium at Benedictine College and Susan’s talk there, you wrote:
Someone in the audience said: Alasdair MacIntyre was not writing about retreat and separation. He was writing about the incommensurability of moral language in our time. Why are you invoking him?
Answer from me: I’m not trying to exegete MacIntyre in my project. I’m just using his general diagnosis as a way to think about our current crisis. Though I am obviously indebted to MacIntyre, it’s not called the Alasdair MacIntyre Option. I’m trying to figure out how we can form those communities and institutions within which our tradition can be lived out in this new Dark Age….
I think a more fair reading of Susan’s recent talk/article is that she wasn’t trying to exegete your BO project. Rather, she was trying to direct attention of her listeners/readers to students of politics like Tocqueville and Pierre Manent, who argue that the peculiar nature of the modern democratic era requires careful analysis of its difference from all previous regimes if one is going to engage at all purposefully in political life. A brief, and inadequate, first response to the assertion of Catholic integralists—that “since man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power” (https://thejosias.com/2016/10/17/integralism-in-three-sentences/) –might be the punchline from the joke about the Irish farmer asked for directions: “Well, if I was going there, I wouldn’t be starting from here.”
I end in the manner of a proud husband. When Susan left federal work in George W. Bush’s last year—the way appointees typically do at the end of administrations—Think Progress designated her one of “The Top 43 Appointees Who Helped Make Bush The Worst President Ever” (https://thinkprogress.org/the-top-43-appointees-who-helped-make-bush-the-worst-president-ever-2e1afb29e135/amp/)
Why so controversial? Her position oversees the administration of Title X, the only federal funding program providing contraceptive services to low-income women and men, but she had applauded President Bush’s proposal to eliminate the requirement that federal employees’ health insurance provide coverage for a range of birth control methods, saying, “We’re quite pleased because fertility is not a disease. It’s not a medical necessity that you have [contraception].” https://rewire.news/article/2008/05/21/bush-ally-susan-orr-resigns-amid-controversy/
“Fertility is not a disease.” Susan said that line made her one of Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Persons in the World,” at least for a day.
Earlier in her federal career, Susan had been involved in actions like writing conscience regulations, which kept medical workers from being forced to participate in morally objectionable actions like abortion or dispensing abortifacient drugs. One of President Obama’s first actions was to remove the conscience protections. I believe the Trump administration re-stored them. This might seem like political folderol—unless you’re a conscientious Catholic medical student or Evangelical pharmacist.
Susan’s late friend Peter Lawler constantly taught that, in political life generally but especially in Modernity, things are always getting better and always getting worse There are benefits that come from living in an age of political freedom and equality, a time with great physical benefits proceeding from scientific research and technological application. And these same benefits can lead to the obscuring of deeper truths about homo viator. There are a few wayfarers who actually have the competence, and the prudence/phronesis, to work in government even near the highest level. I think Susan was trying to direct her words especially to them.

Let me re-emphasize that I have written neither for Susan, nor the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, nor Benedictine College, nor with the knowledge of any of them. And by the way: Susan has read The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, How Dante Can Save Your Life, and The Benedict Option (which she assigned in a class). She likes Ruthie most.

Sincerely yours,
John R. Traffas

[NFR: I didn’t know you expected that to be posted. I commend you (sincerely!) for speaking up for your wife. But the fact is, she badly misrepresented the core idea of my book. I don’t think she did so out of any malice, but I don’t understand why you think I shouldn’t be bothered by the fact that she wrote an entire nine-page piece in an academic journal, based on a straw-man idea of my book. It’s infuriating to have one’s work misrepresented like this, and by a scholar yet. — RD]